


Ninjas and Friends

by brightwhiteparabolas



Series: Alfred Pennyworth's Bookmarks (All Rights Reserved by the T. and M. Wayne Foundation) [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Catwoman (Comics)
Genre: Car Accidents, Classic Cars, Damian Wayne is a Little Shit, Gen, Minor Original Character(s), Minor Violence, No Smut, Noodles Solve All Problems, Swords, WTF Ima post this anyway, Whips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-14 10:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21014459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightwhiteparabolas/pseuds/brightwhiteparabolas
Summary: Selina must convey a sensitive cargo to Wayne Manor from a discreet location outside the city limits.  It should be the perfect opportunity to have things out with Damian, who has been even more of a pest than usual since her engagement to Bruce became official.But the League of Assassins does not include car maintenance in its comprehensive skills training program, and the two encounter some unexpected challenges on the journey.





	Ninjas and Friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Darth-X](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Darth-X).

> Here are the usual warnings:
> 
> 1\. There are OCs (but they are minor and one of them died in the Edo period)
> 
> 2\. There are weapons (but one of them was stolen from an art collection, so it is really an artifact)
> 
> 3\. There is a fight (but it takes place behind a purple VW Beetle and is over very quickly)
> 
> 4\. Inappropriate language is used in front of a child (but the child is Damian)
> 
> 5\. Bad table manners are displayed (but Damian is always at the root of it)
> 
> 6\. There is bad weather (but it stops)
> 
> 7\. The word 'ninja' is given its English plural form of 'ninjas'

**1**

Selina sniffed, and opened the tiny glove compartment.There were no tissues in there, so she tilted back her head and hoped for the best.Thank goodness she hardly ever wore eye make-up.

You will like her story, Kenji had assured her.It is very little-known.As the _kunoichi_ themselves are little known, even within Japan.I will write something of it for you, so that you know what sword you are carrying back to Bruce Wayne. It is best a woman takes it, because of the curse. Remember, Selina.This must be returned.It does not matter who removed it.What matters is its safe return.

Poor Hikaru and her Forked Cat, Selina thought.No wonder the sword is cursed, having been wielded by the greatest female ninja of all and then used against her by her own lover and disciple, another _kunoichi _who was forced to murder her.The fact that Lady Hikaru had also been an orphan, a child of the streets and a lover of cats did not make Selina feel any less like crying.

Although Hikaru, thought Selina, giving in and wiping her eyes furiously on the sleeve of her jacket, would have never have had the poor judgement to fall in love with a billionaire whose family included a smug, recalcitrant little shit named Damian.

His latest exploit had involved ball-bearings in her soup at a Metropolis awards dinner.

“Do you know how _bad_ that makes your father look?”

“But nobody wants Lex Luthor at the table with them.”

“Nobody wants to see me spit leek and potato soup all over him.”

“It is vichysoisse, Selina. Vichysoisse.”

**2**

The rain poured down on Selina’s battered little Volkswagen Beetle as she beckoned through the open passenger door, hoping that her eyes were no longer pink.There was no way she was getting her precious thigh-high boots wet again, especially for that little punk.Ann Demeulemeester trumped Damian Wayne most days of the week and without question on a day as miserable as this one.

“Get into the car,” she hissed. “Alfred and the security goons aren’t coming for you today, because I’ve decided we need to talk. Away from Wayne Manor. Tête-à-tête.”

Damian’s pointy, light brown face registered mild interest. He had just finished his weekly kendo practice and was carrying a set of katana swords across his back as well as his burgundy leather book bag.

“Mano a mano would be more satisfying,” he said. “There’s a dojo back in town that we could rent by the hour. I should be done wiping the floor with you in under thirty minutes, and then we could get something to eat.”

His father’s girlfriend had balls, it must be said. Mad Dog Kenjiro Noto rarely allowed women onto his beautifully-maintained property, and with any luck, Damian reflected, he would emerge from the house at any moment wearing one of his frightful oni masks and hurling curses at her. Now that would be worth seeing.

“You silly boy. Fighting won’t solve anything.”

“Noodles might,” said Damian, sliding into the car at last. “Teacher Kenji knows of a good place nearby. Selina, I thought Father had wanted to get you a little Audi to replace this trash. What happened to that idea?”

The car jerked a couple of times and then pulled forward. Selina snorted.

“I’m his fiancée, not his kept woman.”

“Does Teacher Kenji know that you’re here?”

“I know that house better than you do. So don’t expect him to decapitate me any time soon.”

She drove carefully down a winding dirt path past a pond full of lily pads cowering under the onslaught of the spring rain. A long blue Oldsmobile slouched past them in the mud, spattering the little Beetle with tiny pebbles and other garden detritus. Selina swore at it under her breath.

She blew an extravagant kiss in the direction of a small, waving figure at the gates, which swung open to let the Beetle out into the open road that led towards Otisburg and the city.

“This car smells of cats,” said Damian in a resigned voice.

**3**

The rain had stopped, but so had the car.Almost ten miles out from Teacher Kenji’s house, it completed a bone-jarring hop over a spur in the road and shuddered to a halt.

“Didn’t the League of Assassins make you do any car maintenance training?” asked Selina in a despairing voice. She peered into the Beetle's compact, unreadable grid of interconnected metal tubing and cylinders. She and Damian were standing in front of the car, its little hood raised and propped open. 

“No,” said Damian.

“Useless elitists. Camel riders.”

Damian relented.

“Grayson sometimes obliges me to repair the Batmobile.I think that your alternator needs replacement.”

“Damn_._”

“Call Alfred and get him to send a town car.”

“Come on, Damian.A tow-truck back to Wayne Manor and an Uber into town for us will be perfectly fine.”

She was taking her cell-phone out when a familiar-looking blue Oldsmobile pulled up alongside the little Beetle.Its windows were rolled down, and the driver, a slender, dark-haired man, was looking out of the window at Selina.There were three other men in the car with him.

“Nicky Blades,” said Selina in a cool voice.She leaned her upper body across the body of the Beetle and looked him in the face. Son of a bitch must have tailed us, she thought. 

“Well, what a lucky coincidence. If it isn’t Catwoman her very self.Given up the high life, I hear.And what, you got a kid in tow now too?”

Damian looked up with curiosity.He was now sitting next to his book bag on the grass at the verge of the road, but he let the case with the katanas slip from his back onto the ground behind him and pulled it into his right hand.

“Move along, Nicky,” said Selina.“I take it you’ve come from Mad Dog’s place.There’s not much for you to do here.“

“Oh yes there is,” said Nicky.“I’m looking for a little sword called the Forked Cat, or something like that.You’re a nice girl these days, so you won’t need it.Where you keeping it, Selina?”

Was it a Falcone job that had lifted the sword together with some of the other objects loaned to the Crowne Collection? Selina hadn't followed the case in the news, and given Kenji's unofficial role as discreet, bloodless arbiter of high-level gang disputes, he would never have told her. Whatever the background, here was Nicky, mid-level Falcone operative, with his crooked, opportunistic grin and no doubt a jacket full of the little knives that had earned him his nickname.

Selina drew in her breath, and wondered what Hikaru would have done. She would not have surrendered the sword.

“The sword isn't for you, Nicky,” she said.“Leave the Forked Cat alone.It’s a priceless artifact that needs to be returned to where it came from.”

“Well, those are very big words, and I’m just an ignorant Italian boy.I don’t understand you that well. Tell me where the Cat is.” Nicky grinned more mightily and stepped out of the car.So did two of the men who were with him, and Damian got a good look at them. 

Had he known how horribly skillful Nicholas Baldacci was with the blades of a penknife, Damian might have been more impressed by what he saw, which was a languid man of medium height with narrow eyes, wearing a long silver cross at his neck and several rings on the fingers that were wrapped around a small handgun. The impression of good looks was ruined by bad teeth and legs that were slightly too short for his body.

Nicky pointed the Glock in his hand towards Selina’s head, and Damian edged around the car towards her, katana now in his hand although he was almost sure that it would be unnecessary.He had practiced disarming opponents enough times with his father and with the League to know that hands and feet were usually enough.These men, he judged, would give him little to worry about. One of them was already sweating, and it was not a warm day.

Selina flashed Damian a warning look and let her right hand drop towards the top of her boot.Old habits die hard, and while she had promised Bruce that she would never carry a firearm, the subject of whips had not been raised.This one was a nine-segment chain.

Pulling it from where it hung inside the wide interior cuff of her boot, she whirled it around her head a couple of times and sent it snaking through the air in a form too quick for the human eye to follow.The cloth dart at its end hissed and snapped, and she laughed, making it spin into a fancy series of slashes and parabolas.

Damian was crouched between both cars now. “Selina,” he yelled.His voice was a mix of shock and admiration.“It is a wushu chain whip."

She slammed the hood of the car shut, and leapt onto it, crouching on her haunches and grinning into Nicky’s face like a mask of retribution with a fashionable pixie haircut.She grasped one end of the chain whip in each hand, displaying it to him doubled-over, and shook it several times.

“Let’s see if I’m a nice girl now, Nicky Blades,” she said.“You want the Forked Cat, find her yourself.”

As Nicky stepped back and cocked the handgun, she had already moved into a butterfly kick and came slicing through the air, chain moving towards the Glock to follow the outward swing of her arms.Knock his arm away first, she thought, and then three rotations of the chain around the body should do it, with a bite that would be hard enough to scare him badly without any permanent damage. Besides the Glock and the little knives that they would need to remove from his pockets, he came nowhere near some of the threats that she had confronted either on her own or with Bruce.

With the little handgun disposed of somewhere on the other side of the road, she decided to send the chain whip twice around his neck, unfurling it only after tugging it tight to show him what it could do. Finally, she made it take four whistling turns around his body before binding him inside it. He deserved that much for trying to take back the sword, and if the chain whip left him bruised and sore for several days, it was only what he had asked for. She could see the slim, white-haired ninja laughing quietly in her mind's eye. Hikaru liked what she had done, although she agreed that these adversaries were far beneath either of them.

Damian had disposed of two of the other men in a rather different fashion, sliding them beneath the body of the light-blue Oldsmobile to get them out of the way.He had made good use of supplies from Selina’s little car to gag them and tie them securely.The third, locked inside the car, was a gibbering wreck and could be ignored for now.

Selina looked at his handiwork and gave him a thumbs-up.

Then she pushed her face right up into Nicky’s and brushed his hair back roughly with the back of her hand so that she could look straight into his eyes. “Leave the Forked Cat alone,” she said.“Wherever it is, it’s not for you. Alright?"

**4**

Alfred’s eyebrows were raised only slightly.He was looking through the driver’s window of a blue Oldsmobile at a slender, dark haired man who was bound to the steering wheel with what appeared to be a length of paracord.Three more men were in the backseat, cuffed to each other and gagged, their ankles tied together with nylon rope and ratchet straps. The ties themselves had the distinctive look of Damian's work, although it was unlikely that the imp had done all of this on his own.

“Very interesting, Miss Selina,” he commented.

“Yes, very. This one goes by Nicky Blades. I think the GCPD may have some questions for him about a recent theft from the Crowne collection. He wasn’t very co-operative when I asked him.”

“I take it that your car should be towed directly back to Wayne Manor.”

Selina nodded again. “Yes. There’s something important in it for Bruce.”

“And perhaps the fewer questions I ask about what happened, the better.”

She nodded once more.

"Damian and I will head off for lunch. Give the police my number, but only if you have to."

**5**

“I saw what you had in there when I was searching for more rope,” said Damian. They were in a tidy little wooden booth waiting for their food at the place that Teacher Kenji had recommended. “Why were you taking a famous sword to my father in the trunk of your car under some oily old blankets?”

Selina fixed her dark green eyes on him.

“How would it look if someone headed out from Kenji’s in an armored vehicle with helicopters circling overhead?. They’d have every crime boss in the city all over them and Kenji would be in deep shit. We agreed that the best way to sneak the sword out of his house would be in some crappy little car.Protected by two great warriors who didn’t look like much.A woman and a child.”She grinned.“Because no man would ever take us seriously enough to think that we had it. Or, if we did, that we could defend it. And you can fight, kid, even if your attitude sucks."

Damian flushed bright red and almost choked on his own tongue.He started coughing, and was still coughing when the food arrived, two large, steaming bowls of noodles and several little trays of colorful bite-size things that he had chosen with great care.

"It would have been exactly the kind of plan that Lady Hikaru herself would have made," said Selina. "I'll tell you about her sometime, if you keep your nose clean enough."

"I already know who she is, thank you very much."

“I really don’t think your father has to find out about any of this,” Selina said. “ He doesn’t like us getting into fights.I’ll speak to Alfred about it again.”

The noodles were remarkably good.

“I agree.”

“Or Richard or Tim.Especially Tim.There are too many goodie-goodies who hang around that house.”

“I agree.”

Selina cleared her throat.

“Why are you so horrible to me when we agree on so many things?”

“I am not horrible to you.”

“Oh yes you are.”

There was a long silence.

“Will you and Father have a lot of new children?”

This time, it was Selina who almost choked. Her eyes teared up and she swallowed her mouthful of soup far too quickly.

“It’s none of your fucking business, Damian, but actually, _no_, I really don’t want to have kids. “

She hiccuped several times and pulled the metal tea pot on the table towards herself. The tea would be cold by now, but she didn't care. She re-filled the small cup, took a few sips of it, and wrapped her hands around its curved white surface.

“Are you worried what will happen to you if we have kids?”

Damian kicked the table several times. Then he looked her in the eye squarely and said: “Yes.”

“It’s brave of you to say that.”

“Now you know.”

“Well, I really don’t want to have kids with Bruce.Ever.I don’t want to be a mother. I don’t want to be your mother or your stepmother. I never had a mother, and I don't know how to be a mother.In fact, I sometimes wonder why I’m marrying Bruce at all besides the fact that I like him.I probably shouldn’t say that to you, I guess.”

Damian grinned.“Good. I don’t want you to be my mother either.I already have a mother.”

“So we can be friends, maybe. Now that we got that out of the way."

Damian nodded. “Friends,” he said. “Ninjas and friends. In a manner of speaking. If you show me how to use the wushu whip."

He coughed again. "Can we ask for more noodles?"

**Author's Note:**

> Anything good here is due to Darth-X inspiring me. Anything bad here is due to me. I always mean to keep it fun and light and then OCs and gender politics try to hijack my brain. One day, there will be a medication for that.
> 
> Yes, there were female ninja called kunoichi. A ninja called Hikaru whose female lover was forced to kill her did not exist. 
> 
> The Forked Cat sword is called the Forked Cat because there is a notch at the end of its blade. That is also made up. However, a real forked cat - if any of you are anime people, you'll probably know this - is a nekomata, a Japanese demon cat whose tail has split in two.
> 
> The nine-segment chain whip is a Chinese martial arts (wushu) weapon, and one that is very difficult to master, although it can also be used in a six-segment format. This is very real (and very beautiful) and you can find videos of the art on YouTube. I am no martial artist, but I do know enough about whips to know that a bull whip or a cat o' nine tails is sort of pathetic as a combat weapon. So I decided to give Selina something that would impress the hell out of Damian and allow her to inflict some real damage.
> 
> I realized when I re-read this that Damian's love of noodles was eerily Naruto-like. I didn't do that on purpose.


End file.
